>the idea that teachers should be evaluated based on student outcomes is like kryptonite to union leadership.
My initial reaction to that was "but surely teacher quality isn't a major issue, when there are so many other problems to solve", but then I noticed that the arguments my brain was marshalling didn't reflect my true objection. At about the same time, I thought back to high school and how I stopped taking Spanish after having a particularly awful teacher for third semester.
That's when I realized that my objection was actually about fairness, not the importance of teacher quality. It's not fair that someone can dream of helping kids learn, study for years in college to achieve that goal, accumulate student loan debt, and then in the end, when they finally stand up in front of a classroom ... be so terrible that they cause kids to drop the subject entirely. It's downright tragic, but it's also true.
I do have some qualms about the idea of evaluating "student outcomes". It sounds difficult to do well (how would they have measured my dropping the teacher's subject?), and prone to unintended consequences. There are a few absolutely phenomenal teachers out there, and not all of the results of that are easy to quantify. If a set of evaluation guidelines axed 70% of bad teachers (optimistic) but also reduced or shackled 20% of the really good teachers, I'm not sure that would be worth it.
Those are some practical issues related to the proposed solution. But I think a lot of people, like me, initially flinch away from considering the problem. I've probably thought about this specific concept at least a dozen times, and I only just now noticed the flinch.
Aside from how do you do it, and unintended consequences, a third issue is anyone who's ever worked in a large bureaucracy knows that the mapping between people who generate results and people who generate great numbers is never 1:1 and in toxic environment (like K12 .edu?) its often -1 correlation.
Its entirely possible that with some dedicated pencil whipping your legendarily bad Spanish teacher was turning in the best metric scores in the district.
Its a near universal that smart people focusing on turning in good metrics will turn in good metrics rather than doing their job... after all, they're not being paid to teach, but to generate good numbers. So you'll get good numbers. Pity the kids won't learn anything, but ...
>Its entirely possible that with some dedicated pencil whipping your legendarily bad Spanish teacher was turning in the best metric scores in the district.
Not unlikely. And she's a good example in that she wasn't particularly bad with the material (except insofar as all foreign language education is kind of broken, but that wasn't her fault). But one of the most important things (if not the most important) teachers can do is cultivate in their students a genuine interest in learning about their subject. Instead, I came away with associations of being shamed for not getting things wrong, and of being accused of cheating for trying to extrapolate. This is, to put it mildly, averse to language acquisition.
Anyway, the point is that you're absolutely right. Most of us in her class knew the material at the end of the semester. But knowledge is not very useful in and of itself. Unfortunately, I think that simple fact may be a very big piece of the puzzle, and it's one that the general public seems very far from flipping over.
..not to mention that this is itself an issue caused by poor education. there is nothing quite like 'on the job' learning and evaluation to weed out competence, caring, and understanding from mere intelligence.
looking back, there was no single defining feature of bad teachers I had, but every one of my good teachers were over the age of 40, had previous careers/jobs, and not a single one had a degree (in teaching)..
edit: I think the issue with home schooling is a societal one, we want to set a minimum standard and encourage a minimum level of interaction. I agree that a couple of good teachers make up for a whole lot of mediocre ones.
The strictures of institutional schooling in mandating same-age classes, teaching to test score metrics, and preventing interaction between schools (public/private/home) unfortunately also have the effect of turning this minimum standard into a maximum standard.
>looking back, there was no single defining feature of bad teachers I had, but every one of my good teachers were over the age of 40, had previous careers/jobs, and not a single one had a degree (in teaching)..
One of my favorite teachers my drama teacher, probably somewhere on the younger side of 25-35. The year I quit taking drama classes was the year that she was forced to go back to school because she "wasn't qualified" to teach permanently, having not completed a teaching degree.
My initial reaction to that was "but surely teacher quality isn't a major issue, when there are so many other problems to solve", but then I noticed that the arguments my brain was marshalling didn't reflect my true objection. At about the same time, I thought back to high school and how I stopped taking Spanish after having a particularly awful teacher for third semester.
That's when I realized that my objection was actually about fairness, not the importance of teacher quality. It's not fair that someone can dream of helping kids learn, study for years in college to achieve that goal, accumulate student loan debt, and then in the end, when they finally stand up in front of a classroom ... be so terrible that they cause kids to drop the subject entirely. It's downright tragic, but it's also true.
I do have some qualms about the idea of evaluating "student outcomes". It sounds difficult to do well (how would they have measured my dropping the teacher's subject?), and prone to unintended consequences. There are a few absolutely phenomenal teachers out there, and not all of the results of that are easy to quantify. If a set of evaluation guidelines axed 70% of bad teachers (optimistic) but also reduced or shackled 20% of the really good teachers, I'm not sure that would be worth it.
Those are some practical issues related to the proposed solution. But I think a lot of people, like me, initially flinch away from considering the problem. I've probably thought about this specific concept at least a dozen times, and I only just now noticed the flinch.